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Ohio State won the [insert corporate name here] Cotton Bowl last night. With the defense smothering the USC Trojan offense, relentlessly pressuring and sacking its quarterback and forcing turnovers, the Buckeyes rolled to a 24-7 halftime lead and then endured a scoreless second half to get the victory. It’s the first time the Buckeyes have beaten Southern Cal since 1974, and the dominant defensive performance gives Ohio State fans the ability to argue that the Buckeyes should have made it to the College Football Playoffs this year.

The Cotton Bowl win was also senior quarterback J.T. Barrett’s last game at the offensive helm for Ohio State. In fact, the game was a bit of a microcosm of Barrett’s career at OSU. He scored both offensive touchdowns for the Buckeyes and became the Big Ten’s all-time total offense leader, but the offense became predictable and J.T. run-oriented and was stopped repeatedly in the second half, when with a few additional scores the Buckeyes could have blown the Trojans off the field and really made a statement. That’s why many members of Buckeye Nation view JTB with mixed emotions — they acknowledge him as a winner and appreciate his skills as a runner and a leader, but they also think about what could have been if he had just played a little bit better in the handful of losses that have marred Barrett’s overall record.

I’m not one of the JTB doubters, because I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect perfection from college students. J.T. Barrett has rewritten the Ohio State offensive record books. He’s got a perfect, 4-0 record against That Team Up North, he’s come up big in a number of crucial games, and his play as a redshirt freshman was essential to putting Ohio State in position to win the first national championship in the College Football Playoff era. Ohio State has been in the national championship conversation during each year J.T. Barrett has been at the controls on offense. The fact that the Buckeyes have fallen short during three of those years shouldn’t take away what Barrett has accomplished.

Yesterday Russell and I watched The Last Jedi, the latest episode in the Star Wars line of movies. Spoiler alert: at 2 hours, 35 minutes in length, coupled with a full 25 minutes of uninspired previews for movies I’ll never be interested in seeing, The Last Jedi will test the bladder of any 60-year-old. As my mother would say before any family road trip, be sure you use the bathroom before you get in the car.

Other than pathetic gratitude when the movie was finally over and I could use the facilities, my overall reaction to The Last Jedi was . . . shrug. The Star Wars films have now become so rote and trite, from the scrolling story over the starscape backdrop at the beginning, to the small fighter versus gigantic spacecraft battle scenes, to the powerful, physically disfigured, but ultimately easily fooled bad guy, you can’t help but feel that you’ve seen the movie before. Add in a few cute creatures that have no apparent purpose other than to be cute creatures, thinly disguised rip-offs of scenes from prior movies in the triple trilogy — this time, a thrilling ride through casino town on goat-horse creatures, rather than a thrilling speedscooter trip through a forest — and a few laughs with Chewie, and you’ve got the movie in the can.

Afterwards, Russell and I tried to talk seriously about the movie, but it wasn’t easy. True spoiler alert: So, raspy-voiced General Leia Organa — who I still think of as Princess Leia — can communicate over intergalactic distances with Luke, and use the Force to fly through space besides? Why hasn’t she used her powers to find Luke beforehand, or used the Force to keep her kid from the Dark Side, or to protect Han Solo from being murdered? Wouldn’t you think that the spunky, tough Leia of the original trilogy would have spent the intervening period at least trying to develop some mastery of her powers? It would give her something to do besides just looking with deep concern at hologram projections of battles going bad and sighing heavily as another Rebellion ship gets pulverized. I think Leia’s character has been wasted.

Luke’s character has been wasted, too. He apparently has spent years on some rugged, faraway planet, poring over ancient Jedi texts, a la Obi-Wan Kenobi cooling his heels on Tatooine after Darth Vader’s emergence. But then Luke learns from a ghostly Yoda that the sacred texts really aren’t that important, so phantom Yoda sets them and the sacred tree on fire, freeing Luke to confront and defeat Kylo Ren long distance, before vanishing and — also like Obi-Wan — leaving only crumpled clothing behind. Luke seems a bit dense, doesn’t he? But if I were Luke, I’d be irritated with Master Yoda. Why don’t these ghost Jedi show up in more timely fashion and provide some prompt guidance so people like Luke can get back into the fight? I guess Luke had to suffer, reading the useless old books in some dank tree trunk, until Rae showed up and he could yell at her and treat her three easily taught lessons.

And, now that the old characters have been addressed, let’s talk about the new ones. Yawn. Nah, let’s not. Rae is good at having tears run down her cheeks and being amazingly gifted at just about anything, and Finn is pretty much one-dimensional, and Po Damron would be cashiered from any military force he was part of, and Kylo Ren is thoroughly confused and conflicted and doesn’t seem to know what he really wants. Why did Kylo Ren kill Han Solo? Beats me! Maybe I would have cared more about all of this if I wasn’t feeling the urgent call of nature at the end of this very, very, very, very long epic.

Today I’m going to go watch the Ohio State Buckeyes play the Michigan State Spartans at Ohio Stadium. It will be a noon kickoff, on a cold day. That’s about all I can tell you with any certainty, because I sure can’t predict which Ohio State team might show up to play the game.

This Ohio State squad is a total head-scratcher. They play uninspired football against Oklahoma and get drubbed, then right the ship and convincingly win a bunch of games against the Big Ten Little Sisters of the Poor, then they stage a titanic comeback to beat Penn State in a thriller that puts them squarely back in the conversation for the College Football Playoffs . . . then they lay a colossal egg against Iowa and get obliterated. The Iowa loss not only was a butt-kicking, it was a revelation of sorts: this team obviously hasn’t jelled, and when things started to go south against the Hawkeyes, there was no one who stood up and made the key stop, or secured the key turnover, or broke the tackle and made the long run to turn the momentum around. Iowa was the kind of game, and the kind of embarrassing result, that never would have happened to other Ohio State teams.

Having never been an athlete, I can’t possibly understand what goes in to playing college football at the big-school, Ohio State level, but this year’s team shows that there is a mental component to the game that is every bit as important as the physical component. If a team isn’t focused, if the players don’t play with the right attitude and drive, if the athletes don’t give that extra effort that might make the difference between failure and success, size and speed don’t mean all that much. When everybody on the field is an elite athlete in their own right, grit and determination and toughness count for a lot. Against Iowa, the Buckeyes just didn’t have that indefinable quality. I’m guessing that Urban Meyer and his coaches have spent a lot of time thinking about and working on the team’s mental game this past week.

So at today’s game, will we see Dr. Jekyll, or Mr. Buckeye? I’m sure hoping that the coaches figured out how to get the players ready for this game.

On Friday, U.S. Senator Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky who was one of the many candidates who sought the Republican presidential nomination last year, was assaulted by his next-door neighbor.

According to reports, Paul, who lives in a gated community near Bowling Green, Kentucky, had just stepped off his riding lawn mower when Rene Boucher, a retired anesthesiologist, tackled Paul, who was wearing ear guards and didn’t hear Boucher coming. The assault was so violent that it broke five of Paul’s ribs, bruised his lungs, and left him with cuts on his face. It’s not clear when Paul will be able to return to his job in the Senate. Boucher has been charged with misdemeanor assault, and could be charged with a felony given Paul’s injuries.

Putting aside my revulsion at an unfair sneak attack and physical assault — regardless of our political views, I think we can all agree that tackling somebody from behind and breaking their ribs is not appropriate and must be punished — I at first was intrigued by the news that Paul mows his lawn himself. I’m not in agreement with many of Paul’s positions on the issues, but it’s nice to know that there is still a Senator out there who still willingly experiences some of the basics of life, like cutting the grass. Sometimes you wonder whether our members of Congress, rich, staffed to the gills, and surrounded by people sucking up to them at all times, have any concept of what it is like to live a normal life in America. Cutting your own grass is a good start, so I applaud Senator Paul for that.

But the story of this dispute between neighbors seems to now be going deeper. What would motivate a retired anesthesiologist, who has lived next to Paul for 17 years and once worked in the same hospital with him, to tackle a United States Senator? Boucher’s lawyer said politics had nothing to do with it, and described the circumstances as a “very regrettable dispute between two neighbors over a matter that most people would regard as trivial.” Some people in the area say that Senator Paul — who not only cuts his own grass, but also composts and grows pumpkins on his property — doesn’t pay much attention to property regulations in the area and has different views on property rights than his neighbors. The story linked above cites some anonymous sources as saying that the dispute finally escalated into violence because of things like “stray yard clippings, newly planted saplings and unraked leaves.” Could something minor like blowing yard debris really have been the straw that broke the camel’s back, propelling one neighbor in a fancy community to assault another?

I like a little shot of orange juice in the morning. I’m not talking about gulping down a tumbler full, but just enough for a few swallows. For me, at least, orange juice has a bright tartness that contrasts perfectly with that first cup of coffee, and it seems to help wake me up and get me going.

The question is, should it be orange juice with pulp, or without? I’ve had glasses of orange juice in restaurants that have been more like a slurry than a juice, with so much pulp that the glass is coated with it when you’re finished. That’s just too much pulpy sliminess for me, so I tend to get the low-pulp or pulp-free options.

But I feel guilty about it, because at some point in my life, someone — maybe my mother, maybe some health guru on TV, or maybe some well-meaning but insufferably know-it-all friend — told me that orange juice with pulp is “better” for you than drinking orange juice that has been strained. Why? I don’t really remember, but I think it had something to do with the pulp adding more intestine-scrubbing fiber to your diet. It’s just become one of those nagging, potentially baseless health-related notions floating around in my subconscious, like the vague recollection that eating carrots is supposed to help your eyesight or that fish is “brain food.”

After reading a few of these competing positions, I’ve given up on trying to get to the bottom of the pulp benefits question. I’ve concluded that I like a little orange juice in the morning, and since I’ve managed to follow that regimen for years without becoming super-sized, I guess I’ll continue to do it, sugar intake be damned. And as for pulp — well, I’m going to buy pulp-free offerings sometimes, limited pulp offerings other times, and avoid the over-pulped offerings altogether. That seems to be a good way of threading the health benefits needle, providing some balm for my guilty conscience, and avoiding the thick, pulpy slush that I don’t really like in the first place.

Crayola recently announced that it is putting a new color in its box of 24 crayons. (That’s the standard box that smelled great when you opened it as a kid, not the overpowering big box of 64 crayons that used to have a crayon sharpener hole on the back side that never really worked right.)

The new color is a shade that Crayola has decided to call “bluetiful.” The new color is based on a hue, called YinMn, that scientists accidentally discovered while experimenting with electronics materials. And because a 24-crayon box can only have 24 crayons by definition, the decision to add a new color means that an old color is hitting the cutting room floor. In this instance, the replaced color is dandelion — presumably, a shade of yellow — that joins mulberry, teal blue, magic mint and other “retired colors” in the “Crayola Hall of Fame.”

I groaned when I read this news. Don’t scientists have enough to do without discovering new colors? Don’t scientists know that there are people out there, like me, who think we have too many colors already? We not only can’t remember where certain colors fall on the color spectrum, which means we never fully grok deep conversations about the outfits people are wearing — hey, is “citron” a kind of yellow, or a green, or something else? — we can’t even distinguish the fine gradations in hues that are presented to us when it comes time to decide on paint colors. We are shown tiny squares of colors like “coastal gray” and “cloud” as potential “accent colors” and they already look pretty much the same. God help us if scientists discover even more tints of light gray in between. And now there’s bluetiful, elbowing its way onto the blue color palette that is already crowded with colors like sky blue, royal blue, ocean blue, and azure blue.

When you go up to a bar to order a drink, you want to project a certain nonchalant yet decisive elegance with the bartender that shows her that you’ve been here before and you know what you’re doing.

The goal is steely-eyed, white-jacketed, Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca-like cool certainty, as opposed to waffling or floundering or acting like goofy Clarence the Angel ordering a flaming rum punch at Nick’s, the hard-drinking bar in the alternative, George Bailey-free universe.

Would you know how to order a caipirinha, which the national drink of Brazil? Made with sugarcane distilled spirits called Cachaca, lime, and sugar, it packs a lethal punch and is pronounced kai-pee-reen-ya. Or let’s suppose you were up in Sweden during its endless, dark winter and wanted to warm yourself with a glass of traditional mulled wine, called glogg (with an umlaut over the o, too). Appropriately, it’s pronounced glug, whichshould be easy to remember after you’ve swilled down two or three of them, because Swedish mulled wine tends to have a lot more alcohol than the American version. Or let’s say you’re in a somewhat daintier mood, and feel like having a sgroppino to top off your meal. That’s an Italian concoction of Prosecco, vodka, and lemon sorbet that’s pronounced sro-pee-no. (You wouldn’t want to order that one at Nick’s, by the way.)